Godena on Gina's Response to the WMC (epilogue)

Dear Gina;
I really think that we have come to the end of this
tit-for-tat over the World Mobilization Commission. I am convinced that
you, by focusing on spurious claims of "defensiveness", are evading the
real issues surrounding both the attempts, on the part of reaction, to
discredit Adolfo Oleachea and Luis Arce Borja, and the building up of MASS
SUPPORT for the struggle in Peru. You, on the other hand, feel that what
American workers need are good stiff doses of "Gonzalo Thought", regardless
of whether they see that as relevant to their own struggles.
You see, to me, the cause of the Peruvian Communists
always represented a living, breathing paradigm of what revolution could or
should mean in semi-feudal countries like Peru. It is an important part
of the world revolution, but it is not the world revolution itself. We
have already seen that Lenin was quite emphatic in declaring, at the time of
the demise of the Second International, that the World Revolution should
never be "subordinated to the struggle in any one country." If the whole
is more than the sum of its parts, how can one part be substituted for the
whole. Marx, Engels, and Lenin, especially, would have recoiled at the
thought they should become part of the Holy Grail, even in their own
lifetimes, How can we dishonor them in this way decades or even a century
after their deaths by so enshrining their disciples and successors?
Nor is Marxism-Leninism (or, for that matter, Maoism) a
Vaudeville Act with interchangeable "openings" and "closings" by this or
that personality adopting his favorite peculiarity to every country
regardless of prevailing conditions. There are those who do this who, in
good conscience, call themselves communists. But they themselves know, I
suspect, that their efforts are motivated more by personal components and
idiosyncracies that have nothing to do with communism. There is,
consequently, little that is genuine in the case they present to what few
workers they venture to come in contact with. This failure to immerse
oneself in the masses, in the conditions of the masses own existence,
explains more than any other single cause, the state of the Peruvian
solidarity movement in America today.
That to me is the essence of the WMC; the BROADENING of
the support of the Peruvian revolution among workers, among progressives,
among communists, among all those who oppose imperialsim and the ravages of
monopoly capitalism. You do not see it that way. Let's agree to
disagree and let the matter rest.
Louis Godena
PS: "Chris B" is relevant to this discussion only in the sense that it was
he who started it, by making his impecunious little remark about the PCP and
the World Mobilization Commission. Maybe you should start writing this
stuff down.
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